PEMS F THE MNTH

latest selection

The terror of error
The error of terror
The terror of seeing
The error of being

 

 

Most days I used to write at least one poem or idea:
a complaint somewhere between a runny nose and diarrhœa.

 

AFTER A POEM BY YOSIP MANDELSTAM

"And I was alive" below the blizzard
of the blossoming pear,

I sheltered from the stammering
storm of the cherry tree beneath the cherry tree's
leaf-life and star-shower,
its sap-strength, its primal, invisible
axe-susceptible power
which had nothing to do with
what I had been told was me.

What and where is the joy, the delight
that always takes flight from us
and even our shadows ?
What is being? What is reality? What is right ?

Petals wrinkle and rapture the air,
flurry and float, and I am in
time shrunk to a kernel,
time stretched to the
impossibly, unbearably eternal -
brief sweetness transubstantiating into the glory
of all-encompassing rot.

All is now. All was. All will be and is not.

Anthony Weir

 

 

WE ARE METHOD

Your toe is a pencil.
It traces the hollow of reason.

Layers and layers
of heartbeat and reason.

These are shadows.

Shadows are not method
and we are not echoes.
We lean toward the sun.

They ask us to be pleasure.

Jim Benz

 

Thoughtfulness is even better than mindfulness.
Both together are rarer than worms' eyes.

by

Anthony Weir

The life dutiful, the life romantic,
the life beautiful or pedantic,
a waste of time, of egg, of sperm, of lies,
of lust, of hate, desire, paralysis and dance –
a good death, a lovely corpse
timing, chance
– look
there is Jesus Holy-spook
a money-spinning mannequin
in the schizoid monoworld
of money-laundered human rights
and human progress – human fights
the point,
the centre, the circumference
the be-all, withal, end-all
of exuberance.

I am not Sweeney.
Hear my utterance.
Herewith my inheritance.

 

 

NO IMMACULATE CONCEPTION

The Queen of Sparta might have tried
herbal remedies such as silphium or scammony,
rue or hellebore, early in the pregnancy,
might have tried jumping
or tumbling down the stairs,
taken hot or icy baths, or both,
but probably could not have summoned
the regally-appointed
medicine-man to do the business,
nor even stolen to a secret cave
to meet a helpful woman
or talented male slave.

If she felt that she had been defiled,
she obviously decided to 'just go through'
with it as millions did and do,
stagger on and go
with the thankless flow
towards her mythic, unregretting fame –

unless enthralled, spell-struck,
or thrilled less fleetingly than he,
the queen felt yet more privileged
than she was already...or just normally,
involuntarily maternal.

In any case,
the Olympian shape-shifter's fuck
(or fucks) led to hubris-hallowed towers of flame
and bodies turned to ash throughout
our nasty little history,

and towards a less-painterly end of time
than that foretold by Old Mad John.

So much for Ravished Leda
and the Götterdämmerung.

 

 

Homage to Kostas Karyotakis

"Helen S. Lamari
1878-1912
Poet and Musician
Died in great pain
and contentment."

Death is a baby being born.
Death is the dawning of the sun
and rising of the earthly powers.
Death is the threshing of the corn.
Death is an opera-overture,
the purple lips of heady flowers,
the washing of your too-clean feet,
an acorn which will grow to be a tree
from which to make a bier, a flight of stairs,
a roof-beam and the receipt
upon the back of which
is scrawled a petty poem for a jubilee.

Anthony Weir

 

 

TARAXACUM

Love is less the lion's tooth* -
more a stain of piss upon a sheet
- that spreads - like sappy, spotty youth -
and soon or later
in defeat
fades in the prick's
particle-decelerator.

*Yeats: Crazy Jane Grown Old Looks at the Dancers

Anthony Weir

 

 

" THE BEST LACK ALL CONVICTION "

wrote Yeats -
and the worst, not merely "full
of passionate intensity", are often
frighteningly well-intentioned.

The future is hallucination,
the past a costume-drama
and the present is the numbing
low-level pain of descriptive consciousness.

Time and consciousness
have only the most accidental
of connections. Time is an eternal
abstract stretch, while consciousness
is the awareness, unawareness,
or murderous refutation of futility.
Knowledge is mere imagination,
childish, self-aggrandising, deceiving
and self-deceiving. There will be a time
when there is no time for generation.

Anthony Weir

 

 

WHENEVER ANYONE MENTIONS ALEXANDRIA

a version by Anthony Weir of a poem by
Mikhail Alexeyevich Kuzmin (1872-1936)

Whenever anyone mentions Alexandria,
I see a house and its white walls,
a little row of night-scented stock,
an autumn evening's pale sunlight —
and I hear far music of Oriental flutes.

When someone mentions Alexandria,
I see night-glow over a quiet city,
drunken sailors in unlit alleyways,
a lovely girl's erotic dance —
and I hear timbrels, drunken brawls.

When anyone mentions Alexandria,
I see mauve sunset above green sea,
the flickering of fuzzy stars —
and the pale grey eyes beneath thick brows
that I see even when
no-one mentions Alexandria.

Mikhail Alekseyevich Kuzmin

 

MORE COMPARATIVELY-RECENT POEMS BY ANTHONY WEIR

 

 

Friends
are those who ask you
how you are
only when they really
want to know.

 

 

DATES, FATES AND STATES

On the seventieth anniversary
of my untimely birth I reflect on
those poor "White Trash",
ghetto "Negroes", homeless Hispanics,
Filipina slaves, suicidal First Nation People
and others of the
Necessary Underclass
who died in squalor, pain and misery
beyond Ground Zero
on the eleventh of September
in the two thousand and first year
of the "Christian Era" (or Papal Caliphate)
- and whose deaths were hardly noticed by
a heartless, mechanistic nation-state.

13th September MMXI (Hijri 1432)

 

 

gloss on
GROWING IN SPIRIT
by Constantin Cavafy

If you really want to 'grow in spirit'
you will have to go beyond
obedience and deference.
Your strong moral structure, transcending
mere normality, will transgress
both law and custom.
Sensuality can be more teacher
than diversion.
You may need sometimes to be destructive -
for half the ancient edifice will have to be pulled down.
Thus you will attain a measure of integrity.

 

 

On reading Kornelijus Platelis

I talk, forgetting
that I am conversing with the dead.
Their words form their faces,
make my blood curdle,
and they all talk to me
somewhere beyond my head

where I'm thinking about poetry.
I am in a milky space
between the dead and myself
and my ideas, words, impressions.

Poetry is like mist appearing, disappearing
and no more, no less meaningful
in its vaporous processions.

 

 

HUMANKIND

The only envious
animal lacks beauty of mind.

Inborn interiority's despised
and even punished. The most
destructive are the most admired,
and so we won't permit
an end to misery. Because of us,
life itself is getting tired
and short of breath.

So the last thing
to be frightened of
is death.

 

...NEC MINUS SOLUM QUAM CUM SOLUS*

"Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong."

- George Gordon Noël, Lord Byron
Childe Harold (canto IV, st. 33)

Since I prefer good prose
to mediocre, syllabus-poetry
I read Philip Kerr,
not Séamus Heaney.

This puts me in the
Outer Ring of Outcasts:
those who despise
celebrity, its pawns,
love scrubland,
loathe lawns.

And, being an egregious
solitary, preferring dogs,
I know no literati,
no literary agent, no queens or cogs
of the little cocktail-and-performance
poetry- and literary-
festival industry,
don't go out for evenings,
attend no awful readings
consisting mainly of mutterings
and embarrassed pauses
but compose compulsively
a bold and bald variety of poetry
unacceptable to the
anecdotalists who rule
AngloSaxon Poesy
with its ever-present participles
and detailed, dependent clauses.

So I'll get no ingratiating letter
from Austin, Texas - nor even
from the University of Disheartening
Ulster; so I won't
be tempted to venality,
but continue to shoplift food
(and get caught),
living frugally (washing little,
boiling water in a kettle
on the fire)
on militarist-state welfare handouts
as I've done since I was 24.

* Never less lonely than when alone - a much-quoted phrase from Cicero.

 

 

INSAD

Beyond insight
is insadfulness
that doctors and other
fools might call
depression,
but is really the ineluctable
sense of oppression
that comes with
outsightful consciousness.

And so there is no education
as good as no education.

 

GLOSS
on a poem by Guillaume Apollinaire

Beneath this bridge here runs the river Seine
and our love with it. I should remember
that pleasure sometimes follows pain...
Night falls, clocks chime, days pass -
and I am still. Hand in hand and face to face
we stood while under the arch our arms made
flowed the faërie ooze of everlastingness.

Love (whatever that is) drifts away
like oil on water.
Through drag of life and lunar
pull of hope, days ebb into weeks,
and neither moments
nor loves past ever can return.
Clocks chime and nights decay.

[click HERE to read the original poem and a translation]

 

 

THE NOBLE VILLAGE (an impertinence)

In the famous poem about a quiet railway-stop
there is one word which jars:
'unwontedly' -
unwontedly an awkward word.
Might unexpectedly
not have been less-dicordantly called up
to mind in 1914 ?
Then how perfect
would have been the poem ADLESTROP.

 

 

A LOS CUATRO DE LA TARDE

At four o'clock in the afternoon
on the 27th of May, 1992,
a couple of months into the
four-year-long Siege of Sarajevo,
Bosnian Serbs fired mortar-shells
into a bread-queue.
Twenty-two people were killed
and over seventy were maimed.

For the next twenty-two days,
at four o'clock in the afternoon,
Vedran Smailović, a gifted
local cellist, went to the scene of the 'incident'
and played Albinoni's Adagio in G minor
(which was reconstructed from
a burnt fragment found in the ruins
of the Dresden Music Library
in 1945) as a salute to the dead.

Mr Smailović (whose surname
derives ultimately from Yishma'el )
was able to leave Sarajevo in 1993,
and now lives in Northern Ireland,
surely that sub-state's bravest
and most poetic inhabitant.

[READ MORE]

 

 

IN MEMORIAM DANIEL FARIA

Am I slightly above the dead
here where words are as important
and as overproduced as bread ?
Surely not.

Among all the places wrongly placed -
Plundered houses
Mapless locations
Hovering stones -

We are stained
high-rises of consciousness
Looters, uprooters
Our neighbours' murderers
Trapped in time-zones
Frantic frontiers
Barricaded streets
Busy newsrooms
Crowded courtrooms
Overcrowded prisons...

We are eventual armies of deserters.

 

 

Experiences

are comparable but scarcely communicable -
which is why we hear so little about
digging up corpses.
My corpses lie heavy, won't start to rot
until I become corpse through the magic of Death.
So I have to dig into them, through them,
deeper and deeper, scanning their faint
but plausible faces, as I shovel and shove them aside
to reach the rock underneath
where there is nothing to hide.

 

 

THREE POEMS FROM MY BLOG

After
birth by misadventure
the primly rosy path of progress
to magisterial, unimaginable entropy.

Meanwhile, as our toe-nails grow,
the Atlantic Ocean slowly widens.

Clothed, we are only clothes.

 

'Life is a gift'
like an exploding parcel.
The problem is
how to defuse it.

 

"The Fall of Man"
- was it when
Adam and Eve
mentioned property-rights
and gave God the first
of many horrible frights
and he had to tell them to leave ?

 

 

TRAUENLIED

Metal in mists of blood mankind
tree-stumps and stubble burnt
time maggoty out of mind
attrition without shame
beyond beneath the seas
even the ice is poisoned
and aliens or pornography
or history are to blame

How futile are the prophecies!

 

 

SCARECROW ON THE GOLDEN HORN

I have been born and borne too many times already.
I would like to think
that my last mother also felt this
when she tried to rid her womb of me, but only thrice...

Alas for her - she could not rid me from her heart!

I don't 'believe in' re-incarnation,
or in anything - because I have lived too many
tiring lives, and not sufficiently apart,
known far too poorly
too many people, and too little (and too much),
and felt too much, too long,
died too often and impermanently -
for eternity's an idiot artifice.

'A toad can die of light!'
Perhaps my little coming death will be the last.

In the essence and the end,
Dharma is no more than function in trite
institutions of corruption,
and Yog is just the yoke of everyone's involvement

in horrors yet to come, and passing, and long past.

this poem is a homage to William Butler Yeats, specifically, SAILING TO BYZANTIUM.

 

ON GLANCING THROUGH E.M. CIORAN'S
SHORT HISTORY OF DECAY

Art seems incapable of doubt - thus worthless.
Decay is the fulness.

So grief is replaced by idea, by word,
by insipid obsessions like function
and progress, rebirth,
or Just Being Useful:
directing our void over Earth.

False absolutes wearing gold braid
stride on in parade to the graveyard
of slick definitions and concepts:
'O Rose, thou art sick!'
Dust to dust,
we lie, we sneer, we cajole,
we topple like towers into prayer,
rise up, immure ourselves in castles of disgust.

Answers are so often questions inverted
(and so much is interchangeable:
evil and goodness, theft and property,
water and rust, purity and bile)
but questions delay the decay for a while.

Behold! twin sisters of Jesus, of Buddha;
miasma of failure.
The sick rose feeds the worm,
and its golden seeds encased in avian shit
sprout from the aggressive
myth-mouth of misery,
heart-stopping untruth of wealth.

Love is the worship of the street;
honesty is half-regained by stealth.
We are long since obsolete.

 

 

IN MEMORIAM LUIS BUÑUEL

After you have burned down the ugly,
arrogant hospitals for their disgraceful
defiance of fate, go burn down vainglorious
museums and pompous art-galleries
for their glorification of goods -
and burn down the schools who feed museums
and hospitals and smug universities
- all of the self- and co-serving structures. Destroy
everything that Man (but mostly man-slaves)
erected, for the best of Man is his ruins.
O that we had built nothing, and that
nothing survived but what
we did not make: our caves!

 

 

plagioPALINSESTO :

ÀS VEZES TENHO IDEIAS FELIZES

Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel
Ordnungen ? presagio desatándose
en lenta destrucción de ángeles -
Engel nicht, Menschen nicht, Ordnungen nicht
(louco, sim louco porque
die findigen Tiere merken es schon
daß wir nicht sehr verlässlich zu Haus sind
in der gedeuteten Welt)

lo sentimos hermoso pero sombra,
la noche sucia, la señal como saludo -
sólo premonición,

Geschlechtsteil des Gelds,
los cuerpos,
la cópula cayéndose a pedazos

den wir, wo wir fühlen, verfüchtigen.

(with acknowledgement to Fernando Pessoa,
Rainer Maria Rilke & Homero Aridjis)

 

 

 

>> Six translations of a poem by Rilke >>

 

 

my favourite
HAIKU

by

David Burleigh

Flowers in the dark:
the absence of colour is
a kind of wonder.

 

 

a note on love

 

 

In Memoriam Kurt Schwitters

 

 

Life is too short

to worry about
life being short.

 

 

DOGS & HEAVEN

 

MAXIM of the month

Religion is the recruitment
and mobilisation
of the wilfully superstitious.

 

SOME PREVIOUS MAXIMS:

We forfeit three-quarters of ourselves
in order to be like everyone else.
- Arthur Schopenhauer

 

Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent.
To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden,
where doing nothing was not boring - it was peace.
- Milan Kundera

 

Honour does not need to be won - it needs only not to be lost.

Life is an unpleasant business
which I have resolved to spend in reflection upon it.

A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.
- Arthur Schopenhauer

 

A mind enclosed by language is in prison.
- Simone Weil

 

Consistency is the curse of understanding.

 

Quietude, which some men cannot abide because it reveals
their inward poverty, is as a palace of cedar to the wise.
- Charles H. Spurgeon (English Christian preacher, 1834-1892)

 

It seems to me that nearly 99% of poetry is false.
But maybe high-falutin falsehood is the point of poetry ?

 

To want friendship is a great fault.
Friendship ought to be a gratuitous joy,
like the joys afforded by art or life.
- Simone Weil

 

I'd rather be Ireland's unknown McGonagall
than that island's latest Nobel laureate.

 

The world is getting to be such a dangerous place,
a man is lucky to get out of it alive.
- W.C. Fields

 

Opprobrium is more trustworthy than praise.

 

To get power over a living creature is to defile.
To possess is to defile.
- Simone Weil

 

The very idea of 'happiness' adds to the world's misery.

 

The quickest of us walk about
with well-wadded stupidity.
- George Eliot

 

more recent Maxims and Aphorisms can be read on the
weBlog

 

click for selections from
PREVIOUS PAGES OF THE MONTH >>

 

 

making coffee

 

poetic work in progress >